Robin Leroy

The UTC extends its deepest condolences to Andrew’s family, friends, and his many colleagues around the world.

The UTC notes with great sadness the tragic loss of @babelstone.co.uk, who passed away peacefully on July 10, 2025. UTC acknowledges Andrew’s many valuable contributions over 20+ years to the encoding of East Asian scripts.

The draft minutes of Unicode Technical Committee Meeting #184 (recorded by yours truly) have been posted: www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/251...

That reminds me of a slide in a talk at the Rencontre in Helsinki last year which mentioned dead oxen; the slide was titled GUD BAD.

Studies in Third Millennium Palaeography, 1: Signs TIL and BAD Article Studies in Third Millennium Palaeography, 1: Signs TIL and BAD was published on January 1, 1981 in the journal Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie (volume 71, is...

See doi.org/10.1515/zava....

I think you want 𒌀 (TIL), rather than 𒁁 (BAD). They merge in later styles of cuneiform but are distinct in ED.

Signez la pétition Sauvons le Palais de la découverte

SAUVONS LE PALAIS DE LA DÉCOUVERTE

www.change.org/p/sauvons-le...

(Avis personnel : des musées comme le Grand Palais, il y en a plein à Paris. Il n'y a qu'un Palais de la Découverte.)

Fragment of folio 56A of the B version of the Tangut Homophones text held at the British Library, showing twelve partial entries with eight complete or partial head characters. The partial head character on the bottom right is identified and proposed for encoding in the linked document.

My reconstruction and identification of a partially-preserved Tangut character in a unique fragment of the Homophones text held at the British Library www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

Pas besoin d’une boucle pour avoir ∞ points, il suffit d’un cycle. Et il y a Hubert Robert et Robert Hubert…

I see the 2022 glyph erratum has made it to the Windows system fonts, so that I now see ꙮ with ten eyes rather than seven.

(Are you planning to join?)

In addition to the excellent subject matter 😸 I can so relate to this feeling of there being so many different scripts and delightful sets of type and wanting to make it work to just pack them all in there. #DHmakes

You should come to the UTC to see it all come together!

The draft minutes of Unicode Technical Committee Meeting #183 (recorded by yours truly) have just been posted: www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/250...

You can submit a proposal: www.unicode.org/pending/docs... (and then most likely the PAG will look at it: www.unicode.org/consortium/p..., and report on it to the UTC in July).

There is no such limit.

Dear friends and colleagues, the academic program of the 70th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (Prague, July 7-11) is now available online at rai70.ff.cuni.cz/program.php Registration to attend is still open! #70RAIPrague #Assyriology @FF_CUNI @Orientalniustav @iaassyriology.bsky.social

Flyer publicizing two forthcoming Handbooks on Material Text Culture from De Gruyter: Handbook of Medieval Book Ornament [ISBN 978-3-11-141107-1] and Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures (3 volumes) [ISBN 978-3-11-124094-7]

Monumental three-volume Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures to be published by De Gruyter, early next year hopefully. Open Access eBook! Includes chapters on Khitan and Tangut epigraphy.

On a partially related note, I found the phrase “pause […] for a finite number of years” in Section 4 of L2/25-008 highly amusing.

OUUUUAAAAAIS

www.iapt-taxon.org/nomen/pages/... has some examples under 11.4 (Ex. 14 has two of them for the same species).
See also Ex. 4 in www.iapt-taxon.org/nomen/pages/....

There was earlier discussion of stabilizing case folding (which is what we recommend using for case-insensitive comparison), see decision www.unicode.org/L2/L2005/050..., but presumably they already had well-established implementations that used the mappings rather than the folding.

For example, the convoluted www.unicode.org/policies/sta... added by decision www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/080... is ultimately here because of Microsoft requirements (www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/061...).

It can be worth it to break programs when developers upgrade to the next version of the language, or callers when they upgrade to the next version of the library.
But when standardizing plain text, changes can easily corrupt file systems, databases, or downstream standards that we aren’t aware of.

Programming languages and libraries are what comes to my mind as the SC 22 liaison and an ICU maintainer, but I should note that generally the UTC is much more concerned about stability than most programming language standardizers or library developers.

Stat U+1F339 pristina nomine…

I don’t know. But speaking of that sign, while reviewing and discussing possible names list annotations for L2/25-062, which proposes Leibniz’s notation for multiplication & division, I found out about ⋇, which is to × and ÷ as ± is to + and −, the modern equivalent of the proposed 1CEF3.

We sort of do that; some formal aliases have type “correction”, so you could prefer them based on that.

But formal aliases were only added in 2005 by www.unicode.org/L2/L2005/051...; some implementations are alias-unaware. So the Name still has to be the Name for them.

Ken’s documents are always a lot of fun. See also the early draft L2/05-096 unicode.org/L2/L2005/050..., featuring “Use the term "solidus" and everyone will look blankly at you, except Classics professors wondering what Roman money has to do with it […]”.

Like other stability policies, it is there because people rely on it or want to rely on it.
Programming languages or library authors can use the names as identifiers. For example, C++ now has \N{} escapes: eel.is/c++draft/lex....
Strings won’t break when your compiler picks up a new Unicode version.